A quote: “Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It is already tomorrow in Australia.” ~~ Charles M. Schulz
I’ll start with a story …
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Buddy’s family had lived in this house for 7 generations and me? Heck, I’d been to 7 gradeschools by the time dad finally had a steady job so I was awed not just by the quantity of stuff in his attic, but that some of it was really old to 10-year-old me.
That rainy afternoon, I discovered Sinatra and fell in love with his great-grandma. The feeling I got from holding that old photo, the clear eyes looking into mine. All these years, the feeling only got stronger. Though college, post-grad, indie-research –
Now. Tonight. I climb into my machine and
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
Cameron says: I slid the photograph over to her and she smiled as she looked at it.
“Not bad. Must be high quality to have lasted that long.”
“Funny thing about the woman,” I said. “I took that shot and she vanished before it was developed.”
She grinned at me. “You’re about what? Thirty? And you were there to take that shot in-”
“1943,” I answered. “And you’re the woman in that photo. Like me, you don’t age.” I held up a hand to stop her objections.
“We’re exactly alike although I think I’m older by a century. Let’s talk a while.”
Roger spun the dial — he enjoyed giving his chronoscope simulated interfaces that reflected the world of the time when he’d still been a biological human being — and watched the images flicker across the monitor. The easiest way to determine his target era was to focus on a city and look at the cars. As the model years changed, he could hone in on the year he wanted.
Ah, yes, here was 1950. He’d been an aeronautical engineering student then, and it was about the time he’d met Martha. Hadn’t one of her friends owned a car like that?
For a moment he wished he could reach out to her across time and space. It lasted only a moment before he realized it would be unfair to his younger self — and what could his present self say that wouldn’t cause even more trouble? A literal supernatural ghost reaching backward in time could hardly be more upsetting.
Better to keep his nostalgia to himself.
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